L’Experience Francaise

We flew from Malta to Lyon on an early morning flight. It was €15 for two people to take a Bolt hotel to airport in Malta; it was €34 for two people to take the public transit tram from Lyon airport to the central station. It was grey and cool (comparatively) and we were both glad to have packed sweaters. Also, the Lyon airport is jokingly far away.

Our first French Experience was on the flight; as we started to descend into Lyon one man jumped up, opened the overhead bin, and put on his scarf. There was no way he was going to land on French soil un-scarfed.

We left our luggage at the hotel, had a snack at a boulangerie, did a walk about through the Old Lyon quarter, it started to rain so we popped into a church, St. Jean Baptiste, which was colossally beautiful in its simplicity and austerity, checked-in, then took dinner at a local bouchon (Old Lyon is lousy with them, to the extent it’s Disneyland-esque).

Stephen found our hotel, the Academie, which is in an old building dating to the 15th century. Not a typo. Yes there’s electricity and plumbing but trust me, the hallways are uneven, the rooms staggered off a central stone circular staircase, and the common areas are, how can I put it, ad hoc. But our room is exceptional, top floor, width of the building, both oozing character and with all the creature comforts.

On our first full day we set off for the confluence (of the two rivers, the Rhone and Saone). Lyon lies over three land masses, with Old Lyon on the west dripping with pre-Renaissance architecture. A peninsula in the middle, between the two rivers, a la Manhattan, translates as Almost Island. To the east of the Rhone, flatter and “younger” is the Rive Gauche. Since the walk to the confluence is over an hour we thought it would be interesting to take the public transit ferry from Old Lyon to the Confluence stop. Our second French Experience was that we boarded the ferry, paid €5 each, then disembarked one stop later. The ferry went out of service. What was particularly French about it all was that the ferry then, empty, continued on to the confluence.

Äbove shots: French Experience, ferry not to our destination. We walked from the ferry stop, along the Saone, for the best part of an hour, eventually reaching the confluence. We went to the museum there, which is described on Wikipedia as in the desconstructivist style. Novelist Tom Wolfe referred to buildings like this with less reverence; he said the only way in, the only way you could find the entrance was to look for the piece of modern art, which he called a dog turd, which was generally “dumped” at the pedestrian entrance.

The museum is a bit of museum of anthropology meets museum of natural history meets science world. It was all very interesting and at times enchanting and provocative but also uneven; educational meets well meaning meets didactic. One of the displays was Animal Cult, a consideration of what animals have and do mean to humans, as food, as trophies, instruments of science, pets, entertainment, conduits to the gods, the wild, the domesticated, etc.

One of the most impressive exhibits was a show focused on a French photo-journalist, Stephen Gladieu, who, on about five occasions, had been permitted to enter North Korea and, under the supervision of government guides, take photographs of “everyday” life. The photo at the top of this blog post is “Waitresses Standing Behind a Plastic Wedding Buffet.” Talk about a French Experience. Not.

 

 

After the museum, we walked a while, then took Tram 2 deep east, and then walked to the Musee Lumiere. The mansion built by (the father of the brothers) still stands, although the acres of industrial complex once used to develop their film products are now apartment complexes. This trip was more of a pilgrimage than anything else, and although not a let down could have been amped up significantly with a little, I don’t know, George Lucas coin.

After our visit to the Lumiere museum we decided to walk back to the hotel. That was a major haul, close to an hour and a half. The first part of the walk was agonizingly French Experience, butchers and salumerie, bakeries, patisseries, chocolate shops, little shops selling bijou. Then it got a little more urban, then grittier to the point where you weren’t sure about it all. Then you cross the Rhone, are in the centre, the almost island part, and it’s all Bulgari and Boss, Fendi and Fred Perry, etc. Many of which, given recent protest events, were well boarded up. And finally we crossed the Saone and were back in old Lyon and back at our hotel.

Above, some of the many shops along the walk from the Musee Lumiere, including Patissier Bouillet, ooh-la-la.

For dinner Stephen had booked a tiny little place with about eight tables in old Lyon: Soma. The menu was limited (three starters, three mains, two desserts) but absolutely sensational.

Pictured are, top L clockwise, a vegetarian main, celeriac but treated like meat, parboiled then fried, in a clementine sauce with onion juice and caraway, a cod served in saffron, orange and fennel sauce, tapioca cheese (a Brazilian dish), some Greek wine, and a duck tart with pickled grapes, with quince and potato cream.  So that was a stellar day.  To wear off dinner a bit we strolled the uneven and quaint but sometimes perilous cobblestone streets of the old city.

 

OK, just to close, going back to the Lumiere Museum, they had a wonderful exhibit of the Zoetrope (pre-film, developed 1834, using light and motion to simulate the moving image). The display, by Emile Tolot, had 400 sculptures. If you pressed a button it simulated the Zoetrope effect (and, for anyone who remembers, Coppola’s logo from back in the day).